Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Politix Update: The Death Of Cowboy Conservatism & Other Campaign Morsels

There
was a long familiar Republican soap opera character absent from the second presidential debate the other
night: The Cowboy Conservative.

You know what a Cowboy Conservative is. He's the Stetson hat-wearing dude with a Texas swagger, aw shucks style,
feigned ignorance and a drawl a mile wide as exemplified by George W. Bush
and most recently by Rick Perry, who watched the debate from his ranch .
. . er, townhouse in Austin after becoming the first major casualty of
the 2016 campaign, arguably because of shifting Republican voter demographics as much as any other factor. (Scott Walker has no such excuse. He was, plain and simple, a dud.)

Anyhow, in Dubya's heyday being
a "good ol' boy" was preferable to being an effete urbanite in the eyes of many Republican voters, and they ate up the shtick like crab puffs at a party fundraiser. But as the
party "runs out of old, white, married,
rural voters, being a Cowboy Conservative ain't what it used to be," writes pundit Matt K. Lewis in The Week. This is because younger and more cosmopolitan
conservatives are rejecting that shtick as stupid, if
not downright repellent.

My
own take as an effete FDR liberal is that pretending you are dumb, a
hallmark of the Cowboy Conservative, might have box office appeal, but
it doesn't have legs when it turns out that you are dumb. In the
case of Bush and Perry, their dumbness wasn't necessarily because of a lack of
intelligence, it was because they did dumb things. Perry seemed to acknowledge as much after his campaign crashed and burned so spectacularly in 2012. He got reading glasses, boned up on policy issues, made some pretty good speeches -- notably one about Republicans marginalizing black voters - and dialed back on the shtick, but it was too late.

We
can blame Dubya for many things, and seven years after his
godawful presidency stumbled to an end, the list of his sins is still growing, while the embarrassment Republican bigs feel when confronted by his tarnished legacy seems boundless. But
there is one thing for which we can thank him: The death of Cowboy
Conservatism.

DR. BEN'S FIRST FIRESTORM

Republicans
love to cite the Founding Fathers as a backstop for their wingnuttery,
and reliably get ridiculously wrong what the powdered crowd set actually
said and believed.

To
the inconvenience of Dr. Ben Carson, who does not believe
that a Muslim should be president (he thinks Barack Obama is one) and asserts that the Constitution says
as much, as well as the execrable Ted Cruz and their fellow GOP travelers who also view Islam as a threat to motherhood and apple pie, the Founders recognized Islam as one of the
world's
great faiths.

Thomas Jefferson often consulted a
copy of the Quran and made sure the concept of
religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution included Islam. Hence the great document reads: "No religious Test shall
ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under
the United States."

In what The New York Times calls a "firestorm," Christian
and Islamic groups took issue with Carson. He has been dogged by his own brand of racism everywhere he has gone in recent days, and his efforts to walk back his statements by clarifying his clarifications would be comical if they weren't so damning. (Example: Carson has not been absolute in his view that the Constitution should
be more important than religious belief. Asked if this should
apply to Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to certify same-sex
marriages, he hemmed and hawed and finally said that his view "only applies to presidential
contenders.")

The Council on
American-Islamic Relations called for Carson to leave the race and
expressed outrage that someone like himself who had benefited from the
civil rights
movement would make such an incendiary statement.

"Our message is this:
Dr. Carson, you should have more faith in the American people," said
Rabiah Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
"Fifty years ago, people in the United States said African-Americans
were unfit to be president. Because of civil rights leaders, you have
the right to run for president."

No matter, 43 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim, according to a CNN poll, up from 31 percent in 2010, while a PPP poll finds 49 percent of Republicans think Islam should be illegal. That's not going to change when even the candidates not into name calling don't want to roil the party base.

CROCODILE TEARS FOR SCOTTY

Halley's
Comet lasted longer than Scott Walker's presidential campaign, which
should not come as a shock to anyone who spent . . . say, five seconds
on the guy and realized that he was a Tea Party cipher. (Yes, Trump was a factor.)

But before we
relegate the Wisconsin governor to the scrap yard of campaigns, one thing
is worth noting in this age of Citizens United: Walker was
supposed to be able to stay in the hunt for a long time because of super
PAC money, but when you don't have a campaign worth funding -- and
despite spending millions of dollars in Iowa alone Walker would have had to sit at the kiddie table at the next debate -- the money from the rich farts goes poof!

And while you didn't ask, I see fellow governator John Kasich benefiting the most from Walker's flameout, not Marco Rubio as some pundits say, with Lindsay Graham being the next dropout.

YET ANOTHER SHOE DROPS -- ON CHRISTIE'S HEAD

Beating
up on Chris Christie is so much fun. The Republican presidential
wannabe is finding over and over again that paybacks for the crap and
corruption that have characterized his tenure as New Jersey governor are a
bitch, and Walker's exit from the big dance won't matter squat to Christie's running-on-fumes campaign.

The last time we checked on His Corpulence, the CEO of United Airlines and two other execs had been shown the door after being caught in one of the tentacles in the long-running
fallout from Christie' very own Bridgegate scandal. Now comes word that a New Jersey state lottery privatization scheme that benefited two cronies, including a central figure in Bridgegate who screwed the pooch in the United flap, is a flop.

Christie
had declared that taking the lottery private would boost revenues and
stimulate sales. Just the opposite has happened, and the lottery has
cut state income for the second straight year, creating a $136 million
shortfall in the 2015 budget.

IT'S ONLY ROCK 'N' ROLL, BUT WE LIKE IT

Political
candidates have been appropriating rock songs for their campaigns for years, and almost without fail if they're Republicans,
they get their ears cuffed by offended musicians, who almost without fail are
liberals of the Democratic persuasion (Ted Nugent is a rare exception)
who threaten to sue if the candidates don't stop using their songs.

The
most (in)famous such appropriation is Ronald Reagan's use of "Born in
the U.S.A.," which drew a sharp rebuke from Bruce Springsteen, who is
kind of rare among rockers for being a political activist who puts his money where his mouth is and did a slew of get-out-the-vote concerts
for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Now comes R.E.M., which has given Donald Trump and Ted Cruz their collective middle finger for the
unauthorized use of the band's "It's the End of the World as We Know It,"
and Survivor co-founder Frankie Sullivan for Mike Huckabee's unauthorized use of the band's "Eye of the Tiger."

"Go
f*ck yourselves, the lot of you -- you sad, attention-grabbing,
power-hungry little men," R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe declared. "Do
not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign."

Politix Update
is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen,
for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.
Click here for an index of previous Politix Updates.

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About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.